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Dank Sinatra's jams ready to mature

For the past two years, the winner of the Flagpole Music Award for the city’s best jam band has been one of the city’s youngest groups: Dank Sinatra, a barely 21⁄2-year-old band made up of four University of Georgia students who’ve yet to graduate.

But school hasn’t stopped guitarist Joe Gaines, bassist Clint Meadows, keyboardist Matt Henderson and a revolving cast of percussionists and multi-instrumentalists from playing packed shows at the Georgia Theatre and touring around the South.

“Every weekend, we’ve been playing shows. When Monday comes, we’ve got to get back in the school zone. It’s been a bit ass-kicking as of late,” Gaines said. “But we just try to get through it. After the semester, we’re looking to play all the time.”

The band members all graduate this fall.

School, though, isn’t truly unaffiliated to their extracurricular rock activities. Both Gaines and Henderson study in the Music Business Program in Terry College.

The coursework, Henderson said, helps the band professionally.

“One of the reasons I came to school here was for that program,” Henderson said. “The management, booking, all those things I’ve been able to apply. It’s been a huge help, and David Barbe helps us with anything we need.”

Just a couple of months into the band’s existence, they’d already booked shows outside of Athens, riding into other Southern college towns for the night.

Dank Sinatra’s members call a number of Southern cities their hometowns — Greenville, Savannah, Chattanooga — so they already had some confidence to head out on the road.

The skills Henderson and Gaines have learned in school, Meadows explained, became clear and useful once they hit the highway.

In an example of how music business protocol has changed in the past decade, Dank Sinatra has never charged for recordings, considering it smarter to help as many people hear it as possible and hope a donation or two comes their way.

“I feel like we live in a day when it’s best to get your name out there, and when you are big enough, start charging,” Meadows said.

Gaines said he sees the live show becoming more important in the future, and that the music business paradigm has shifted a bit.

“We want to fuel our live shows,” Gaines said. “If we can get people in the door by giving them our music for free, that’s awesome. We can reel them in a little bit.”

Free versus paid music is constant discussion in MBUS classes, Henderson said, admitting that the business model is ever-changing, and he wasn’t positive if even his band knew exactly how they felt about it.

“I like to think that with a lot of our songs you can listen to just the music,” Gaines said. “Not that lyrics are an afterthought. We definitely put time into those. But that’s what pulls people in, especially in a live atmosphere where you aren’t catching all the words. From a musical standpoint, we try to push it.”

In the early days, Dank Sinatra built songs from jams, Henderson said, and a couple of chords would a song make. But as they’ve matured, they’ve grown into an ability to write as a group, noting which melodies are better for choruses, verses or extended improvisation.

Being able to stretch out live, Gaines said, keeps the band from getting bored. Otherwise, they’d feel like robots, he said, switching from verse to chorus, verse to chorus, end.

“It’s a conversation onstage, where we talk to each other and see where it goes,” he said.

Dank Sinatra loves to jam, they admit, but more than anything, they’re figuring out what sets them apart from the saturated jam band scene, and how to make the most of any difference as quickly as possible.

The bands Dank looks up to, the greats of jam like Phish and Widespread Panic, all had something that made them stand out, no matter if they all heavily improvised in similar ways.

More modern jams bands — like Sound Tribe Sector 9 and Umphree’s McGee — have incorporated electronic dance music and hip-hop, and that’s not off the table for Dank Sinatra.

“We’re trying to veer away from laptops as much as possible,” Meadows said.

Dank, first and foremost, focuses on live dancing, and what better way to make a crowd shake than a full-live band.

On record, the band sounds most comfortable riding in the way-back machine, grooving not unlike the Grateful Dead or the Allman Brothers. And according to Gaines, time traveling is the best way to discover a route to a singular sound.

“I approach it like a history lesson,” he said. “If we are compared to Widespread Panic, it’s like, let’s take it back and see who they are influenced by. If you can take it back all the way to the ’30s and ’40s, if you can go back to the roots, you can do something unique with it.”